


We Get By

by brightredbirdie



Series: Unlikely Bedfellows [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, teen+ for language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightredbirdie/pseuds/brightredbirdie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christine Chapel has known from the start that befriending Jim Kirk would lead to trouble; but it's not until their third year at the Academy that she realizes how badly she'd underestimated how much trouble one man could cause.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd because I am too impatient to wait for my poor beta reader to get online! But I hope it's an all right reading experience, anyway. This fic has been a looong time coming.

Christine hates working sims like this.

She’s on the observation deck above the engineering levels of the USS Cromwell, a fake ship used for training exercise for second-year engineering cadets. It’s stunningly well-built; looking down at it, she’d swear she was seeing the actual inner workings of a starship, not just a pile computers and engines on the far side of the east campus. But the integrity of the simulation is beyond the point for her; this is the third sim this week she’s had to sit through as a medical officer on-call. And at least the last two had been with Leonard-- today she’s stuck with Dr. Bentzen. It’s going to be a long three hours.

A voice tears her away from her wallowing: “So, you come here often?”

For a moment she almost snaps back with something venomous; then she recognizes the voice and turns her head to see the familiar, smiling face of one Jim Kirk, sliding into the seat next to her. She puts in a half-hearted effort not to smile back and rolls her eyes as dramatically as she can. “You know I do.

“What are _you_ doing here?”

He shrugs, putting on the air of easy innocence she’s come to associate with his worst trouble-making. In the three years she’s known him, she’s figured out only a fraction of his idiosyncrasies, and to be honest, she prides herself on that. As expressive as he is, Jim is anything but open; he puts on a good show, that’s all. Underneath that, as far as she’s concerned, he’s mostly unreadable.

In anyone else she’d be uncomfortable with that kind of uncertainty.

“Maybe I just wanted to see you.”

“Or _maybe_ you’re looking for trouble.” She narrows her eyes at him. “No one but sim staff are allowed up here.”

He laughs, just quiet enough not to attract attention. “I don’t know where you get these ideas, Chris.”

She turns pointedly back to her monitor. The sim hasn’t started yet, but the cadets they’ll be testing are already aboard their mock ship, and the screens display their vitals in vivid colors. “Give me a good reason not to report you,” she says, as primly as she can manage.

(Which, if she does say so herself, is pretty goddamned prim.)

“You’d probably get me suspended,” he offers.

“Not my problem.”

“Yeah, but you like me.” The smile he gives her is a far cry from his usual dazzling charisma, the eyes he used to give her in their first year. She likes to think the ease behind it is genuine. “Anyway, I just came to watch.”

She shakes her head, not looking away from the monitors. “All right, I’ll let you hang yourself. But whatever you’re up to, I hope you don’t expect to drag me into it.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him gesture a vague criss-cross over his heart.

At that moment, Commander Darhad enters the observation deck, flanked by her yeoman and the last of the instructors in charge of the sim. Jim stands and fades into the background as Bentzen comes up to take his place in the chair next to Christine.

“All hands, here we go.”

The Cromwell is a fairly basic test of teamwork under pressure and applied skills. The cadets --the engineering crew, in the narrative of the simulation-- are in charge of repairs to the engines and the computer mainframe of the ship, and with each team the instructors throw a different wrench into the mix. It’s nothing particularly riveting until the moment something goes wrong. She’d been present last term when a cadet managed to cause an explosion on one of the middle decks -- she still isn’t really clear how. Lt. Commander Tien told her it was something to do with “repulsor rays,” but she isn’t stupid. She may not know much about engineering, but she can see when someone’s pulling her leg.

Whatever started it, though, that was a mess. They’d had to treat not only the first cadet for blast injuries, but the deck collapsed onto five other cadets, who had to be dug out before they could even start in on them. She and the doctor on call had had to climb down to start triage, and apparently no one on the observation deck thought to call the Academy Hospital while they were doing that. The whole thing was a clusterfuck, to be honest. Not Starfleet’s most shining moment.

Needless to say, the Cromwell is not Christine’s very favorite place to be.

Half an hour into today’s sim, she’s just starting to think maybe this one will go off without a hitch when suddenly everything goes dark. The emergency lights flicker on momentarily, bathing everyone on the observation deck in an eerie greenish glow. Below them, the cadets seem to think this is part of the sim; they keep their heads, at least.

Darhad is yelling for someone’s head as the instructors rush to figure out the problem, a controlled chaos erupting on the observation deck. Christine stays where she is, looking down at the cadets scrambling to their own places. Bentzen is caught up in the chaos, she thinks, and _someone_ needs to be paying attention when one of them injuries themself.

But she still steals a glance back into the shadows, just for a second.

It’s long enough for her to see Jim Kirk, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and a devilish smirk across his face.


	2. Chapter 2

"So you think Jim did it," Leonard says, sounding resigned.

Three years ago she'd been hoping to work with this abrasive bastard as little as she could. But, well, you don't get to know Jim Kirk without also getting to know Leonard McCoy, and in that time she'd discovered that he may be a piece of work, but under that he's actually a soft touch.

She likes him a little better than Jim, if she's honest.

Right now he's in his scrubs, fresh out of his second surgery and looking vaguely dead. It's almost 18:00 and she's eating a cafeteria salad as quickly as she can --lunch!-- while he's just gotten off shift, punching buttons on the staff room coffee maker like it's done him personal wrong. (And it may have. It's not the most reliable of machinery, in her experience.)

He doesn't sound skeptical of her theory, which makes her feel a little less paranoid. Leonard knows Jim better than she does.

"You should've seen the look on his face," she says through a mouthful of cherry tomato and onion.

He snorts. "Believe me, I can picture it."

She swallows the last of her salad and stands to toss the empty container, rolling her eyes but smiling. "I'm sure you can."

\----

She doesn't get a chance to talk to him about it again until the next day. They have a leadership lecture with Dr. Stasny, and he has just enough free time after to walk her back to her dorm, which _she_ thinks is unnecessary but he thinks he's being a gentleman or some shit.

He sees the look on her face as they leave the building and sighs. "No, I don't know how he could hack into the Cromwell's systems." With a practiced look of disgruntlement, he adds, "And yes, I do think you're overthinking this."

"I just want to know what he's up to," she huffs. There's an unspoken _before he drags me into it_  trailing after.

"Who's up to something?" Jim chirps brightly from behind her.

They both turn to scowl at him. "Don't you have a class?" she asks at the same time Leonard growls, "Who do you think?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jim sing-songs.

"Can it, kid." Leonard almost scoffs.

"You're both too suspicious for your own good."

Christine sighs. "But you just _happened_ to be there when the Cromwell fritzed out."

"Yeah, lucky, huh?" Jim grins. "That was a good show."

She narrows her eyes back at him. "I'm sure."

"Just because you're-- Oh." Jim waves distractedly, and Christine spots an Orion girl across the way stopping and beaming back. "I gotta go," he says with her least-favorite of his smiles. "See your paranoid asses later."

He jogs over to the girl, and Christine raises her eyebrows at Leonard. "Know who that is?"

He shrugs with a heavy roll of his eyes. "Good hook-up, I guess. Jim probably doesn't know either."

They both snort, grinning at each other.

\----

Across the quad, Jim Kirk carefully _doesn't_ glance over his shoulder, not letting his friends see his conspiratorial smile. "So, it worked like a charm, Gai."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annnnnnnnd I'm super late to post again! :\ Better late than never?

Her name is Gaila, and Jim has apparently been spending a lot of time with her. She's a fourth-year cadet in engineering, with a specialty in computer programming. And if the rumor mill can be trusted at all, she's slept with at least two-thirds of the Academy. Sexual exploits aside, she's not very popular; that's what happens, Christine supposes, when you get a reputation like that...

"So you've done your homework." Leonard raises an eyebrow sharply, and she gets the feeling it still doesn't totally convey his derision.

She scowls back at him. "Shut up. I'm just saying, it's convenient he starts hanging out with a computer programmer just before--"

"You're not still on about that Cromwell thing, are you?" he asks, already knowing the answer. "What do you even care for?"

She narrows her eyes. "I don't like secrets."

He makes a face at her, but there's a good-naturedness behind the skepticism. "You're gonna get in trouble someday because of that, you snoop."

"I'm already in trouble." She leans back in her chair. "I know you and Jim, don't I?"

" _Very_ funny."

"I know," she smirks.

"Could you two talk a little louder?" someone at the next table asks pointedly. They jab irritably at the **quiet please**  sign by the library door.

Christine smiles politely, waving a quick assent, and Leonard gives them his best _fuck off_   face.

But he does speak softer as he says, "So you think this Orion girl helped Jim hack into the Cromwell?"

"It's not implausible," she answers.

"I guess not."

She crosses her arms, leaning over the table. "I just wish I knew _why_..."

\----

"Your nurse friend is persistent as hell," Gaila says without preamble as she comes up behind him on the quad.

Jim doesn't pretend to be surprised; he's used to Gaila's sudden appearances, and he already knows that Christine Chapel is nothing if not bull-headed. He just grins at her. "Got her teeth in you?"

Gaila feigns indignant innocence. "It's almost like she thinks _we_ were involved in that Cromwell thing."

"Imagine that."

"I know," she laughs, then purses her lips at him. "But seriously, this isn't gonna get us in trouble, is it?"

"What, Chris?" Jim considers it for a moment. She's not exactly a stickler for the rules, but she does care about fair play and all that... He thinks he could convince her what he's doing _is_ fair play, but who knows. He's just sure that if she decided they were up to no good, she'd turn them in for sure. If only to spite him for not telling her.

Gaila raises her eyebrows at him, now frowning deeply.

He smiles neutrally back at her. "Nah. Chris' good people, I could talk her around."

"Sure." Gaila rolls her eyes. "You're not _that_ charming you, know. One of these days that overconfidence is going to get you in real trouble."

It's his turn to laugh now, and she gives him dirty looks for it.

"Sorry. But you sound just like her."

Gaila huffs primly, which does nothing to lessen the resemblance. "Maybe I want to. You talk about her all the time." Her expression turns sly. "Sometimes I think you like her better than me."

"I like everyone better than you, Gai."

She pushes him off the path.


End file.
